Organizing Your Plug-ins
Many Cubasians have the habit of getting tons of plug-ins. This usually resultats in a visual mess when trying to select one in particular from the list.
With the first versions of Cubase, available plug-ins were shown in neat colums. Past a certain number of plug-ins in the VST folder the screen was covered with the plugs' names when you tried to access them, some were even inacessable. At the time of version 3.6 or 3.7 (sorry, I can't remember exactly which one) Steinberg opted for another scheme: a single list, with an arrow at the bottom to access those not visible. A little better, but still far from perfect. However a simple tip, though maybe not well documented, was provided by Steinberg on our Mailing-List. By organizing your plug-ins folder, you can obtain something more user-friendly. Let's see in more detail what the tip consists in !
Whether you have Cubase 3.7 or 5.0, you'll find a Vstplugins older by following the path Program Files / Steinberg / Cubase. This folder contains the plug-ins' DLL.
The good news is that it's perfectly possible to create sub-folders whithin this one folder. Create for exemple sub-folders for a particular type of plug-ins, or maybe by author. Once this is done, you only have to drag and drop the DLLs in the folders of your choice. You can move the VST Instruments files too. A warning though, DO NOT displace the DLLs corresponding to Cubase's internal effects, which are really more a function than a real plug-in. They are the following : CubaseDither, Dynamics, VSTDx et VSTDynamics. So, all of this for what ?
Well, to have a nice and clean room your mom would be proud of! Let's see what the result is :
VST plug-ins
VST Instruments
You have to admit that this is all a little clearer, no? Last thing : with Cubase VST 5.0x there are two Vstplugins folders : one in the Cubase 5.0 folder, the other in the Steinberg folder. The latter contains the "old" plug-ins, notably the ones that came with former versions, and some VST Instruments. So as not to get plug-ins everywhere I've moved them to the Cubase VST 5.0 / Vstplugins folder without any problem.
So, I'll let you do the cleaning between your 372 freeware plug-ins ! However, you can note that one or two good reverbs can do the job, why overfeed the beast ?